We are going to analyse the issue of alterity in the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno through the study of Abel Sánchez. In this nivola, Unamuno examines the concept of envy and establishes the bases of a theory of alterity based on the specular relationship with the other, which it is constituted by the scarcities of the one who looks. We will also look at what are the philosophical premises of this narration, in which way it is linked with the (...) organic philosophy of Unamuno, and what its relationship with the theatre piece El Otro is, released more than a decade after but of a quite similar subject. Finally, we will outline a possible theory of the alterity by Unamuno that it is formulated through the fraternity and altruistic help. (shrink)

Kant ha subrayado el carácter problemático del auto-conocimiento en el campo de la antropología y la psicología: desde sus primeras obras insistió en la imposibilidad de conocer con certeza, sobre la base de las acciones, la disposición moral subjetiva, la única que da a la acción un valor moral. Esta dificultad no se atenúa cuando el juicio moral es dirigido sobre el sujeto mismo. A los problemas cognitivos se añade una tendencia al auto-engaño que está activa en toda la vida (...) moral. Si se mantiene la importancia de este argumento, puede emerger una caracterización de la Gesinnung que la distingue de cualquier “intención” subjetiva. Aquella puede ser concebida más bien como una estructura “objetiva”, independiente de la conciencia subjetiva y análoga a una idea regulativa, que obliga a interpretar las acciones morales sobre la base de un principio que es necesario asumir, pero que no es posible conocer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy to, (...) and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

Este trabajo se centra en la gestión de los bienes naturales comunes, y desarrolla brevemente dos enfoques sobre el ambiente y su cuidado; destaca las ventajas de un enfoque interdisciplinario en la gestión comunal de los bienes naturales y en la consiguiente elaboración de políticas ambientales. Se analiza la gestión comunal de estos bienes comunes partiendo de la noción de responsabilidad fuerte, que cuestiona la concepción de las personas como agentes autointeresados, y se identifican requisitos ineludibles: adecuación a las condiciones (...) sociales y ecológicas de cada lugar, información completa y relevante, procesos democráticos de decisión y reconocimiento por parte de los gobiernos de la capacidad y el derecho de los usuarios de elaborar sus propias normas y monitorear su cumplimiento. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to determine the degree to which undergraduate students’ learning approach, academic achievement and satisfaction were determined by the combination of an intrapersonal factor (self-regulation) and a interpersonal factor (contextual or regulatory teaching). The hypothesis proposed that greater combined regulation (internal and external) would be accompanied by more of a deep approach to learning, more satisfaction and higher achievement, while a lower level of combined regulation would determine a surface approach, less satisfaction and lower achievement. (...) Within an ex post facto design by selection, 1036 university students completed validated questionnaires using an online tool. Several multivariate analyses were conducted. Results showed that the combination of self-regulation and external regulation can be ordered as levels along a five-point scale or heuristic. These levels linearly determine type of learning approach, academic achievement and satisfaction. Implications are established for quality and improvement of the teaching and learning process at university. (shrink)

A number of arguments have shown that randomization is not essential in experimental design. Scientific conclusions can be drawn on data from experimental designs that do not involve randomization. John Worrall has recently taken proponents of randomized studies to task for suggesting otherwise. In doing so, however, Worrall makes an additional claim: randomized interventional studies are epistemologically equivalent to observational studies, providing the experimental groups are comparable according to background knowledge. I argue against this claim. In the context of testing (...) the efficacy of drug therapies, well-designed interventional studies are epistemologically superior to well-designed observational studies because they have the capacity to avoid a type of selection bias. Although arguments for interventional studies are present in the medical literature, these arguments are too often presented as an argument for randomization. Randomization in interventional studies is defended on Bayesian grounds. (shrink)

In ‘History of the Lie: Prolegomena’ (2002) Jacques Derrida examines Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the modern lie in politics in her essays ‘Lying in Politics’ (1972) and ‘Truth and Politics’ (1968/ 1993). Arendt contrasts the traditional lie, where lies were told and secrets kept for the greater good or to defeat the enemy, with the modern lie, which comprises deception and self-deception on a massive scale. My paper investigates the seriousness of different kinds of lies in political life in the (...) light of Arendt and Derrida’s reflections on lying and contemporary lies in politics and shows where concern should focus. (shrink)

The combination of student Self-Regulation (SR) and the context of Regulatory Teaching (RT), each in varying degree, has recently been demonstrated to have effects on achievement emotions, factors and symptoms of stress, and coping strategies. The aim of the present research study is to verify its possible further effects, on academic behavioral confidence and procrastination. A total of 1193 university students completed validated online questionnaires with regard to specific subjects in their degree program. Using an ex post facto design, multivariate (...) analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM) were carried out in order to test the relationships predicted by the model. SR and RT had a significant joint effect in determining the degree of academic behavioral confidence and of procrastination. Academic behavioral confidence also significantly predicted reasons for procrastinating, and these in turn predicted activities of procrastination. Conclusions are discussed, insisting on the combined weight of the two variables in determining academic behavioral confidence, reasons for procrastinating and activities subject to procrastination, in university students. Implications for guidance and educational support of university students and teachers are analyzed. (shrink)

Evidence-based policy has support in many areas of government and in public affairs more generally. In this paper we outline what evidence-based policy is, then we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we argue that it faces a serious challenge to provide a plausible, over-arching account of evidence. We contrast evidence-based policy with evidence-based medicine, especially the role of evidence in assessing the effectiveness of medicines. The evidence required for policy decisions does not easily lend itself to randomized controlled (...) trials, nor, for that matter, being listed in a single all-purpose hierarchy. (shrink)

A critique of--and alternative to--pure narrative approaches to life-history, offered by a distinguished Hungarian philospher.

The work of Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) comprises major contributions in the areas of feminist phenomenology, international justice, political theory, and ethical responses to differences. Many of Young's articles, such as ‘Throwing like a Girl’, ‘Pregnant Embodiment’, ‘Women Recovering our Clothes’, ‘Gender as Seriality’, and ‘House and home’, in addition to her books Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) and Inclusion and Democracy (2000) are particularly significant. My paper shows how Young's earlier essays in feminist phenomenology concerning the lived (...) body can be linked to her later political thought, despite her own separation of these two strands in her work. Furthermore, I explore her legacy by examining how feminists have challenged her self-criticisms and have also developed Young's ideas in these fields, including her work on oppression and responsibility. (shrink)

What new forms of ethical engagement are emerging in naturecultural worlds? In this paper I explore the example of the practical ethics of the permaculture movement. I put these in dialogue first with new approaches to ethics in biopolitics and naturecultures and second with a reading of feminist care ethics. Across this discussion I focus on the potential of ethos transformations experienced through everyday doings to promote ethical obligations of care. If we are living in a naturecultural world where politics (...) and ethics conflate in biopolitics, the permaculture movement is an example of an alter-biopolitical intervention. It works within bios with an ethics of collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of its search of alternatives for hopeful flourishing for all beings. (shrink)

A situação de pandemia gerada pela COVID-19 é, sem dúvida, um dos acontecimentos mais extremos que a sociedade está tendo que enfrentar neste século, tanto por sua extensão, como pela duração, previsível continuidade e consequências. Este artigo aborda os diferentes estilos educativos parentais, objetivando subsidiar reflexões sobre a parentalidade e a adaptação psicossocial das crianças diante da pandemia. A fundamentação teórico-conceitual está baseada nos estilos educativos parentais a partir da abordagem tipológica. De acordo com a literatura, pais com um estilo (...) educativo autorizativo e indulgente podem contribuir para que as crianças enfrentem adversidades de maneira mais adaptativa. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential of realist cinema to portray resistance to oppression and restrictions on people’s lives. Wadjda presents a special case in world cinema in being made in Saudi Arabia, which until recently had no film industry or distribution system. The director, Hafaa Al Mansour, has been praised for making the film there at all. Yet this ignores the film’s power in taking a slice of time in the life of a young Riyadh girl, Wadjda, and focussing on (...) her desire to own a bicycle. The film’s realism depicts restrictions on women’s lives in Saudi Arabia and at the same time affirms hope in gradual change through the natality, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, of a child who does not see these constraints as insurmountable obstacles. I argue that realist films can demonstrate the importance of gradual political progress and can anticipate those advances. (shrink)

What does Le Premier Homme bring specifically to our understanding of Camus’s view of love? The novel allows us to understand love as love of specific human individuals, as well as love of life and the world, and a sense of the frailties of love. While many commentaries have touched on the idea of the importance of love in this work, they have tended to focus more on the disguised autobiographical elements concerning the people in Camus’s life. They have also (...) centred on the descriptive aspects of the work. What I would like to do is look at how love is presented in more depth, and show how specific kinds of love are valorized, and how these different kinds of love are all connected. (shrink)

There has long been a tension in Fredric Jameson’s work regarding the extent to which it is possible or warranted to develop transhistorical categories for literary interpretation across of the whole of the capitalist mode of production. In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the problem of how Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology participates in such questions in its consideration of periodisation and narrativisation through the particular construction of allegory, from the early modern age to our financial present.

One of the few philosophers who comments on fashion, Kant claims in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that fashion should be classified as vanity and foolishness. He writes ‘it is novelty that makes fashion popular, and to be inventive in all sorts of external forms, even if they often degenerate into something fantastic and somewhat hideous, belongs to the style of courtiers, especially ladies. Others then anxiously imitate these forms, and those in low social positions burden themselves (...) with them long after the courtiers have put them away. – So fashion is not, strictly speaking, a matter of taste (for it can be quite contrary to taste), but of mere vanity in giving oneself airs, and of rivalry in outdoing one another by it.’ (Anthropology, 2006, 7: 246) Kant’s condemnation of fashion depends on him associating fashion exclusively with mere novelty in production (as opposed to true originality) and imitation in fashion’s wearers. In this paper I distinguish fashion understood as invention for its own sake followed by slavish imitation with a true fashion, which like art, involves both taste and ‘genius’ as understood by Kant. Taste involves a judgement of a particular to be, for example, beautiful. This judgement must be one that we can communicate to others. Genius is in fashion that is original and provides a model to others. (See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 308) While notable designer fashion provides the most obvious examples, this way of looking at fashion does not preclude the possibility of this kind of genius developing outside or alongside the fashion industry. Furthermore, wearers of fashion have to exercise their sense of taste in choosing what to wear and how to wear it. This sense of taste appeals to others and requires an enlargement of our thought just as our taste in art does. Thus seen, fashion and interest in fashion has a potential for improvement of the self as other forms of taste arguably do. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophers' Denigration of Fashion Taste and Style Genius Love of Beauty as A Moral (Or Proto‐moral) Motive Conclusion.

Immanuel Kant is often thought of as an excessively austere figure of the enlightenment, eschewing especially the emotions. Yet his contribution to the enlightenment includes a distinctive sensitivity to the role that love and the beautiful, particularly in nature, play in our ethical lives. There are a number of arguments scattered through Kant’s work that aim to establish a connection between love of the beautiful and morality. My goal is to connect the most significant of these to build a picture (...) of his concern with the topic, and to assess the arguments for their insight and their revelation of complexity and significance of Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. What I show here is that love of the beautiful is meaningfully connected to morality in a range of ways; thus this love of the beautiful indicates the crucial, if not predominant, role of emotions in Kant’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

This book provides an account of ethical restoration in situations that bring ethical and political questions together. It shows how punishment as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are necessary to properly restore peace and justice in both transitional and democratic societies.

The tension between the absence of identity and the feeling of presence theorised in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy is revealed in D’ailleurs Derrida, a film by Safaa Fathy (1999). Fathy’s film has had limited scholarly attention, yet it makes a distinctive contribution both to understanding and questioning Derridean thought. I argue that the not-meness of identity is revealed by Fathy through the theme of ‘elsewhere’ (ailleurs) in the film and yet it allows the audience to experience the tone and cadence of (...) Derrida’s speaking voice, in counterpoint with contemporary and archival images, thus providing a sense of his philosophy in relation to his life. The film shows how forms of absence such as silence, the not-said, and even pauses are essential to his work. Ultimately the film operates by giving Derrida the location, space, and time to articulate his views on identity, the close relationship between writing and filming, the experience of being ‘the Marrano’s Marrano’, circumcision, forgiveness and hospitality, and absence and presence. Nevertheless, Fathy’s film both reflects and questions his philosophical focus on absence and spectrality through a range of cinematic techniques, including reverse shots and cross-cutting between locations. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant, in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ focuses on reason as the touchstone for speculative thought. The question of how to orient ourselves in thinking is still pressing, particularly if one does not take reason as providing principles for judgment. Hannah Arendt and Michèle Le Dœuff focus on this problem of orientation from a practical point of view and build up a compelling picture of how we can orient our thought. Both take imagination to be central to good judgment, (...) in addition to critical rationality. The project of enriching our imaginary and improving our judgments is an essential one in both ethics and politics, since imagination can either enable creative changes in our thinking or be stymied by pernicious myths. Arendt’s writings offer an account of the significance of the imagination to reliable judgment and suggest ways to avoid the extremes of arrogance and diffidence. Furthermore, Le Dœuff argues in recent work that we should challenge a range of myths in the epistemic imaginary and chart a course that involves hope for the future. I consider how it is possible to enrich the imaginary to overcome damaging myths, on Le Dœuff’s account, by taking political questions, particularly feminist ones, as reference points and also by avoiding the opposites of lack of faith in one’s own judgement and over-confidence. (shrink)

Kant suggests in The Metaphysics of Morals that we may sometimes say something untrue or insincere since others are free to interpret our statements as they wish. (1996, 6:238) Yet he also argues that even in conflict situations we should be truthful so as to not eliminate trust and to make it possible for a rightful condition to arise. My paper considers the conditions Kant believes essential to maintain basic trust so that in better times peace is possible. It also (...) considers their relation to sincerity. I argue that Kant’s view can provide a model for building political trust after wars and other forms of conflict. Furthermore, I consider the need for the possibility of help as also necessary for trust, through the work of Jean Améry. In certain situations, sincerity is not the most important thing. More important are truthfulness and the willingness to act as if we were sincere and thought others and the world worthy of our trust. (shrink)